5 Bucks a Day

I can’t chat long right now, need to get back to watch the 2nd NCAA Final four game, but I’ve had a good time this weekend.

I have a programming background, back in the 70’s and 80’s on large mainframes, never really programmed on a PC, but it’s in my blood.

So this weekend, after looking around a bit, I decided to bite the bullet and see if I could come up with a hack for my phpBB forum to integrate a “buy a beer” style function, similar to the Warrior Forum one, to allow members to make payments to other members PayPal accounts.

I looked at existing solutions, and didn’t find much. What I did find didn’t do what I wanted them to do, but one was close.

So, with a bit of trial and error, my old programming genes kicked in, and I was able to get it done last night and this morning. Our forum is now buzzing with the possiblities this new feature provides.

Initially I’m recommending that members sell their own special reports, or those they have resell rights to, to other members at very special prices. The traffic is there, obviously a very targeted bunch of prospective buyers is there, and I think members who apply some ingenuity will do very well with this feature.

If you’re a member (if you bought the 5 Bucks a Day book), this opens up a whole new and very exciting income stream. There are people at the Warrior Forum who make thousands of dollars with their special offers, and they’re glad to pay a $20 listing fee to do so.

In our forum, there is no listing charge (yet), and though the audience isn’t large, it should be profitable, plus we allow members to sell products they have resell rights to, where WF only allows original works.

A legitimate and profitable business model would be to pick up new resell rights products, sell them as a special offer for half or 75% off the suggested retail price, and only a few sales will have your original investment recouped, everything else will be profits.

If you aren’t a member yet, this is just one more reason to buy the book.

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A month or so ago, one of my readers emailed me with a question about how to get started making money. He had already written a report which was only a few pages, he listed it as an eBay classified ad, and it didn’t sell. He wanted to know what to do. I read what he had and it was actually a pretty good idea, but needed expanding and some marketing applied to it.

I recommended to him that he expand the report from just a few pages to at least 20, add in some pictures demonstrating what he was writing about, put in some links to affiliate merchants, and distribute it as a $7 Secrets style report. From there he could build up an email list of people interested in the subject (his market could number in the millions!) and after distributing this little and cheap report, he could follow up with more of the same as often as he liked.

I wish the report would have been mine, I would have made getting it distributed far and wide an absolute priority. Even if I gave it away for free. You can become very successful giving things away for free, but that’s a topic for another day.

By the way, if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say $7 Secrets style report, you need to invest $7 in learning all about it, your life could change by downloading $7 Secrets.

He hasn’t done that yet to my knowledge, but today was a day where I started catching up on my reading, and I read another report that made me think of my reader.

The report I read tells how to write those $7 reports quickly and easily. I’ve been writing for quite a while, actually since college days, off and on. When I read this new report, which is called “Write That Report!” I was truly impressed with the ease the author makes writing money making reports seem.

From conception of an idea to getting it out on the market making you money, if you already have some knowledge of your subject matter, it could be less than a couple of days. If you have less knowledge, you probably need to spend another day researching, maybe less if you’re good at that already.

I highly recommend picking up “Write That Report” if you want to take the next step to making yourself famous. I’ll talk more about what writing can do for you in another post soon.

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Starting an Internet Marketing business is one of the few ways where you can make money with no money to invest.

I say this coming from a history of starting 2 major businesses, one from 1980 through 1989, and other from 1989 through the present, actually. Both, especially the latter, required huge outlays of cash to start and continue. That’s not what I want to talk about today, though.

If you want to make money from your computer, and have little or no money to invest, now is the best time to be alive. Assuming you have a computer and an internet connection, and I presume that you do if you’re reading this, you need little else.

For example, you can join affiliate networks such as Commission Junction or Linkshare. True, they require you to have a web site to join, but you can get over that hurdle by putting up a blog on Google’s blogger. Just post interesting comments daily for a few weeks and you should have no problem getting accepted.

You can join Clickbank, and immediately start recommending downloadable eBooks and software products from over 10,000 merchants without further approval.

Even without a web site, you can succeed by doing what’s called Bum Marketing. That’s the art of writing articles, submitting them to article directories, or posting them in places like Squidoo, with a link to your affiliate merchant, and once people start reading your articles and clicking on the link to the product you’re recommending, you start earning money.

Yes, writing a bunch of articles and/or blog posts every week can get tedious after a while for all but the diehard writer, but it’s a means to an end. It can generate seed money for you to take the next step, which might be signing up for a web host so that you can have your own web site selling or reviewing products.

Or it could be your seed money to start running pay per click ads to get faster and higher volumes of traffic to your site or your merchant.

Or it could be your seed money to outsource development of your own product, which will enable you to entice affiliates to promote your site.

So much opportunity, available for anyone with some ambition, some spare time, a computer and an internet connection. Is that you?

Inside 5 Bucks a Day, you’ll find plenty more ideas of how to make money and how to grow your own empire, by adding just $5/day to your income stream. Or if you’re really on a tight budget, you can buy the budget version, called 5 Bucks a Day, Jr. and get just as much information without the bonuses.

What a wonderful time to be alive.

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The other day when I recommended Amazon Hunter to my forum members as a specially recommended purchase, I was surprised not at the number of people who took my recommendation to purchase it, but at the number of people who purchased it and had never used Google’s AdWords Editor before.

The AdWords Editor is a desktop utility that allows you to manage your AdWords account offline. It’s quick, easy, and very, very powerful.

I had the pleasure of being a beta tester for the software many months ago, and as soon as I saw it I couldn’t go back. In fact, there was a short period of about a week where it stopped working during the beta test period, and until it was fixed I just refused to use the original online interface. Rather than put up new campaigns and make money, I chose to wait for the editor to be fixed.

So, like I said, I’m amazed at how many still aren’t using it. You can get it here (for free, of course):
http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/index.html

What made me think of it today was a blog post made by Google showing the top 10 features they consider pretty neat:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/03/adwords-editors-top-10-favorites.html

There are some tips there that I wasn’t aware of, how about you?

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I’ve been struggling the last couple days, with the old “writers block”. It’ll pass, I’m sure, I think it’s due to being behind on my reading. Reading new thoughts and ideas usually inspire me, but lately I’ve been working on my taxes and it’s been pretty mind numbing.

I did read something today that reminded me of something I’ve said often, but maybe not in this spot.

I feel strongly that the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. Not real estate. Not the stock market. Not in pork bellies. Although any or all of them can make you a profit, the profit will not nearly be as substantial as an investment in yourself.

Especially if you’re young, but even when you’re not.

Everyone thinks a college education is a sure path to success, and it helps. There are many who skipped that route, or stopped short, but still succeeded. And there are many with degrees, even graduate degrees, who failed to succeed.

The key, in my opinion, is to refuse to stop learning until the day you leave this earth.

I write primarily to and about Internet Marketers, so that’s my focus, but it’s true in any career. Continuing self education is essential.

I was just working on one portion of my taxes tonight, logging in some expenses, and I see that I spent around $2500 last year for downloadable eBooks. That doesn’t include the monthly subscriptions I pay for some membership sites that provide me with more education. Many internet marketers rave about how much they benefit from going to seminars that cost up to $2000 or more for a few days. I haven’t done that yet, but want to when I can start getting away from the office, hopefully this year.

I teach in 5 Bucks a Day that if you keep on doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve been getting. Actually that probably isn’t true completely in a competitive field, because the competition is moving ahead. If you’re standing still, you’re probably falling behind.

I’m actually shocked and appalled that I spent less than $300 a month on educating myself last year. Hopefully I can ramp that investment up in 2007, if I do, I’m sure my income will increase more than it did in 2006. I must admit, 2006 was not disappointing in the least.

If you can’t find it in your budget to occasionally invest in learning a new skill, improving an old one, or improving your productivity by purchasing tools that help you do what you do better, you’re falling behind. Find a way to spend money on yourself (I’m not talking about new clothes or gadgets, either). You won’t regret it, I guarantee you.

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This happened last week, but I was just made aware of it yesterday:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-16mar07.htm

Registerfly has been a popular domain registrant, but in the last year or so, service has been less than spectacular, to say the least. It is now being shut down by ICANN as an accredited registrar.

In the past I’ve used Registerfly to register domains, as well as others. Registerfly was cheap and efficient back when things were running smoothly, but things have not been running smoothly lately.

I’ve heard horror stories recently about domains being locked and domain owners unable to renew or transfer them, essentially ruining their business. This is a serious situation.

I urge anyone reading this that has registered domains with Registerfly to act immediately to transfer them to another accredited registrar.

Personally, I use Enom, NameCheap, and GoDaddy, and have had no problems with any of them.

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Several months ago, I made up my mind that I would start branching out to promote other merchants. Previously I mainly promoted eBay and Clickbank merchants. I decided to check out amazon.com because of the huge amount of products they sell on their site.

However, I quickly became discouraged. It was difficult to pick from the seemingly millions of products, and even more difficult to construct the links necessary to send people to.

Now that’s all changed. There’s a new product called “Amazon Hunter” which makes it easy to promote an unlimited number of products using Google AdWords.

Using traditional tools in the past, it would take me at least 15 to 20 minutes to find and set up a campaign for a single product. Now, with Amazon Hunter, I could probably do 100 in that time if I tried.

Amazon Hunter is a desktop utility that allows you to pull down amazon products by category, by price range, and by keyword. Then you can sort the results down by specifying that you only want to promote those products that no other affiliate is promoting yet.

And then, you can take that data, and quickly copy it and paste it into Google’s AdWords Editor, and you’re ready to go.

This is an unbelievably useful software tool, you can find out more about it at the AmazonHunter web site.

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